14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 — Earlier I wrote how Google seems to have had a bad week, with some recent negative publicity making it seem like the tipping point of Google becoming the big bad company they don't want to be happening — at least perhaps in the eyes of many opinion makers on the web.

Google Under Fire; May Rule Forever Nonetheless — The press/blogosphere pendulum, rarely stable, is swinging to an extreme anti-Google position as we start the new year. The discovery of another contact-list hack inside GMail has led to the usual complaints about the company's dominance.

Google, the King & the King Maker — This past weekend a series of posts from some of the more influential bloggers prompted me to ask the question: do we trust Google? Results of our spot poll indicated that at least our readers were almost evenly split into three camps …

Is it a bargain or obsolete? — It's getting harder to know when to buy — The day after Christmas, prices on big-screen TVs went down and Raul Axtle pounced. — Axtle and his 16-year-old son, Shaheen, headed to a Best Buy electronics store in Emeryville, Calif., to buy the TV that Shaheen …

2007: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn't Live Without — A year ago I wrote a post called "Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn't Live Without" and listed thirteen startups who's products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day.

Ailing music biz set to relax digital restrictions — LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - The anti-digital rights management (DRM) bandwagon is getting more crowded by the day. Even some major-label executives are pushing for the right to sell digital downloads as unprotected MP3s.

GMail Vulnerable To Contact List Hijacking — Affordable Hosting — Using a form of cross scripting, it becomes easy to steal a GMail user's contact list if they visit a certain type of website. The only condition is you have to be logged in to GMail at the time of the attack.

Music Industry Changes Its Tune on Podcasting — After two years of hesitancy, the music industry is finally taking its first steps toward embracing podcasting. — When podcasts attained prominence in 2004, amateurs and advertisers alike heralded the downloadable audio programs as the next step in the evolution of broadcasting.

The Race to Beat Google — Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus — In an article in the January 1st 2007 issue of NYTimes, reporter Miguel Helft writes about the race in Silicon Valley to beat Google. Certainly the future of search has been much talked about lately.

RSS wasn't invented — In the dustup over Microsoft's RSS patents, some of the mainstream press brought up, once again, the issue of Who Invented RSS. But RSS doesn't have an inventor. It wasn't invented. Something else happened, something harder than invention, imho …

P-to-P goes Hollywood — BitTorrent co-founder talks up business plans and death of DRM — With all the legal disputes arising from P-to-P (peer to peer) file sharing networks such as Napster, Gnutella, and KaZaa in recent years, it's easy to forget that the concept of P-to-P networks is almost as old as the Internet itself.

The unedited voice of a person — People use blogs primarily to discuss one question — what is a blog? The discussion will continue as long as there are blogs. — It's no different from other media, all they ever talk about is what they are. We got dinged by the NY Times …